We're grateful to the Long Leaf Pine Slate for supplying a clutch of new candidate videos for Democrats running in flippable NC General Assembly districts. We've also been writing about these folks for months. The Long Leaf Pine Slate has been successfully raising money for these races all year. Some of the results can be seen in the professional introductory videos -- quick hits of personality and vital biography highlighted by snazzy graphics, so that although the candidate talks directly to the camera, they never lapse into static "talking-head" mode. I'll be highlighting these videos one at a time over coming days/weeks.
Nicole Quick in House District 59 (Guilford County). Jon Hardister is the Republican incumbent and a majority whip. District is rated "Lean Republican." Trump took the district with 53.06% of the vote in 2016.
"Quick is a 20-year resident of Guilford County and former manufacturing executive. As a parent of a child with autism, she is passionate about education quality, the environment and voting rights .... This district in the Greensboro suburbs has leaned slightly Republican in the past, but with Democratic turnout likely to increase in 2020, is ripe for a strong challenger like Quick." (The Long Leaf Pine Slate)
"Under the new NC House map, NC-H59 is about 9 points more favorable for Democrats, making it an excellent target to flip in 2020 .... Republicans’ performance has only been possible because Democratic turnout has significantly lagged Republican turnout in the district. The great news is that 2020 primary turnout was up 20% in Guilford County over 2016, and there is ample room to reverse the slight Republican lean in this district in recent elections by building on that momentum to turn out sporadic Democratic voters here this fall. Democrats are fielding a strong challenger in NC-H59 in Nicole Quick. Born in southeastern North Carolina, she currently resides in eastern Guilford County. Quick’s history as a business leader includes time forecasting and budgeting at Guilford Mills. When her son was diagnosed with autism, she decided to undergo training to provide daily occupational therapy for him. Quick went on to lead teacher instruction and workshops focused on working with children with autism in inclusive classrooms." (FlipNC.org)
We're grateful to the Long Leaf Pine Slate for supplying a clutch of new candidate videos for Democrats running in flippable NC General Assembly districts. We've also been writing about these folks for months. The Long Leaf Pine Slate has been successfully raising money for these races all year. Some of the results can be seen in the professional introductory videos -- quick hits of personality and vital biography highlighted by snazzy graphics, so that although the candidate talks directly to the camera, they never lapse into static "talking-head" mode. I'll be highlighting these videos one at a time over coming days/weeks.
Adam Ericson in House District 20 (New Hanover County). Ted Davis is the incumbent Republican. Michael Bitzer considers the district "Safe Republican." Trump won the district with 55.09% of the vote. The most recent remapping double-bunked two incumbent Republicans -- Holly Grange, who opted to run for governor against Dan Forest in the Republican primary, and Ted Davis, who's represented Dist. 19 for several terms. Holly Grange went down in her primary; Ted Davis remains on the ballot in a district which doesn't know him as well.
"Adam Ericson is a public high school teacher. He believes that the governed deserve real representation, but do not have it today in North Carolina. He is running a bold campaign to invest in North Carolina's education, fight for worker's rights, make health care affordable and ensure a livable climate for our state's next generation." (The Long Leaf Pine Slate)
"Gov. Cooper lost the newly constituted NC-H20 by just 5 points in 2016, and the NC House race was just as close in 2018. The pool of left-leaning voters who stayed home in NC-H20 in 2018 was about 14 points more left-leaning than the folks who came out to the polls, and the great news is that 2020 primary turnout was up 30% over 2016! This district is flippable if we can get enough left-leaning voters to the polls in November." (FlipNC.org)
Dave Wasserman, US House editor for the Cook Political Report, posted a number of updates on the ratings of certain House races on July 17th, and we enjoyed seeing Dan Bishop (NC09) on the "anti-Trump wave watch list."
Finally, six GOP incumbents move out of Solid R into
's Likely R category, which is essentially an anti-Trump wave watch list:
#CA04 Tom McClintock (R)
#NC09 Dan Bishop (R)
#OH12 Troy Balderson (R)
#TX03 Van Taylor (R)
#TX06 Ron Wright (R)
#TX25 Roger Williams (R)
A reminder that Democrat Cynthia Wallace is the candidate forcing that change of prospects for Dan Bishop. Cynthia Wallace seems freshly minted to energize those underperforming Democrats that Dan McCready failed to win over in last year's special election. I've been spending time on her website and on her social media, and she seems both highly qualified and brimming with confident energy. She earned a mathematics degree at Spelman College in Atlanta, a master's degree in statistics, and she works in the high pressure financial services industry in Charlotte as an expert in risk management and government regulations.
Perhaps overlooked in accounting for her surging candidacy is her deep involvement in Democratic Party activism. She's currently the Democratic chair of the 9th Congressional District, which means she's well known in all her counties among progressive activists, giving her a network of volunteers and a base of support that Dan McCready had to build from the ground up.
We're grateful to the Long Leaf Pine Slate for supplying a clutch of new candidate videos for Democrats running in flippable NC General Assembly districts. We've also been writing about these folks for months. The Long Leaf Pine Slate has been successfully raising money for these races all year. Some of the results can be seen in the professional introductory videos -- quick hits of personality and vital biography highlighted by snazzy graphics, so that although the candidate talks directly to the camera, they never lapse into static "talking-head" mode. I'll be highlighting these videos one at a time over coming days/weeks.
Frances Vinell Jackson in House District 45 (Cumberland Co.). John Szoka is the incumbent Republican. Race is rated "Toss-Up." FlipNC.org says it now leans "slightly Democratic." Trump took only 49.93% of the vote there.
Frances Jackson: "A Fayetteville native, long-time public servant, and local magistrate." "A longtime Hope Mills resident, government planner, and professor at Fayetteville Technical Community College. Her key priorities include increasing teacher pay, assuring water safety in the Gray’s Creek area, and protecting women’s reproductive rights."
I'm continuing to explore the Democratic talent recruited to run for Congress this year in the state directly to the south of us, and I'm impressed. Take a look at Adair Boroughs, running against the notorious Republican Joe Wilson in CD2:
She's willing to take the fight right up in Wilson's grille. I like that in a candidate, especially one running in a district that the Cook Political Report rates R+12. CD2 is the area in robin's egg blue below, and you might notice how most of the big city of Columbia is carefully gerrymandered out:
Here are some "fast facts" about the district provided on Boroughs' website, and they provide rich material for strategic political thinking:
South Carolina's 2nd Congressional District has a population of approximately 700,000 people
46% of eligible SC-02 voters cast ballots in the 2018 midterm election
75% of SC-02 is under the age of 65
25% of SC-02 is African-American
The 2nd district is majority women
If you've got volunteers and a ground game, those statistics offer a lot of room for turning things around, especially that wide pool of voters who haven't been voting. (As far as I can tell, incumbent Joe Wilson has never faced a strong Democrat before.) Aggressive voter registration, number one. Aggressive outreach, even in the Age of COVID, via phone-calling, texting, high-saturation social media. I get a tingle thinking about it.
Clearly, Adair Boroughs is whip smart and a fighter and a highly trained lawyer who could be making big bucks but who chose instead to run a nonprofit to help people with legal problems who can't help themselves: "...with an eye toward supporting hard-working, low-income families like those she grew up with, Adair helped launch Charleston Legal Access, a nonprofit law firm that provides affordable legal services to those in the middle—those who don’t qualify for free legal services but cannot afford the high cost of private attorneys. Since its founding in 2016, CLA has put over $1.5 million back in the pockets of working-class families through its representation."
I have new respect for a rising class of Democratic talent in South Carolina. Adair Boroughs joins Moe Brown in the 5th CD (written about here a couple of days ago) and Joe Cunningham in the 1st CD (whom I profiled during his 2018 surprise win along the coastal strip of South Carolina including Charleston). Boroughs and Brown could join Cunningham in Washington next year.
Rapid eye-blinking is often a sign of stress. When Thom Tillis answers this journalist's questions, his blinking is many times a minute. Many times.
Here's some free advice for Senator Tillis from the Body Language Project: "Avoid rapid blinking when you think you will be judged on your honesty as many people attribute a high blink rate to stress, and stress, to lying."
Cal Cunningham looks to be doing to incumbent Republican Senator Thom Tillis what Thom Tillis did to Kay Hagan in 2014. Tillis beat Hagan by 45,608 votes out of 2,915,281 total votes cast.
Kay Hagan made Senator Elizabeth Dole a one-termer in 2008, beating her by a much wider margin, some 361,801 votes. Elizabeth Dole had easily taken the open seat in 2002 following the retirement of Sen. Jesse Helms.
It's almost like ole Jesse cursed the seat or something, for it's produced a line of one-term senators ever since he left it.
We expect Thom Tillis to fall to that curse, come November, and we also expect Cal Cunningham to break that curse once he's our new senator from North Carolina.
Watch Moe Brown's introductory video first, and then we'll talk:
Speaking as a former political operative who's seen a lot of up-and-comers, I have to say that Moe Brown is one of those candidates, one of those you'd relish working for, a successful and attractive young man running as a Black "moderate" but in a mostly White, rural South Carolina Congressional district. Yikes.
The 5th CD of SC ain't no picnic. It's currently represented by up-scale real estate developer Ralph Norman, Republican winner of a special election in June 2017 to replace Congressman Mick Mulvaney (who -- let's face it -- has been diminished by the Trump presidency). After Norman got to Congress, in April 2018, "he was meeting with constituents at a diner in Rock Hill ... when he noticed a gaggle of women in the room wearing red
T-shirts, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. So what did Ralph Norman do? He pulled a handgun out of his jacket pocket and placed it on the table, where it remained for the next several minutes."
Norman also defended the racism of Congressman Steve King, before King was kicked out of the House Republican caucus. More recently, Norman appeared as a cheerleader "in a viral live-streamed video [just two days ago] that featured doctors downplaying the threat of the coronavirus and claiming to have found a cure." That video got banned from social media for appalling misinformation.
In other words, Norman's a giant dick in the Mulvaney tradition (with a little Sperm Thurmond thrown in for flavor).
But (see below) Norman won that special election against feisty Democrat Archie Parnell with only 50.04 percent of the vote. (Parnell challenged Norman again in 2018, but did worse, getting only 41.49 percent. Very old assault allegations against Parnell had surfaced.) Despite the close election of 2017 and because of his easy reelection in 2018, Norman looks secure (exceptions cited below). Cook Political Report rates the district R+9, "Solid Republican."
Moe Brown's Candidacy
His video stopped me in my tracks and made me reassess. Maybe the 2017 special-election squeaker that put Norman into office with only 50.04 percent of the vote was closer to the real potential of the 5th District, than was the Nov. 2018 loss by Parnell (whose past had tracked him down. I profiled Parnell approvingly in April 2018).
Moe Brown's personal story is compelling. It's up by your bootstraps by pluck and vinegar, reflecting virtue and will power, and Southern White people used to honor that, at least in themselves. But he's also an athletic star, wide receiver and captain of the Gamecocks, playing the quintessential game of Southern manhood. He's also got the engaging personality ("infectious" according to The State) and the obvious smarts to get things done at a high level. He himself is a suburban Charlottean, commuting to his professional job in the city. He correctly brags in his intro video about personally making development deals for Governor Nikki Haley through the six years he worked in her Commerce Department that brought in over a $1 billion and 5,000 jobs to the state (a factoid repeated on his website).
The rap against Moe Brown is that he's probably too corporate. FITSNews, a center/right news aggregator that nevertheless has a good reputation for accuracy, doesn't believe Moe Brown won't raise taxes, and "if middle class taxpayers are going to experience the sort of advancement upper class taxpayers have experienced under the administration of Donald Trump," then we need more of a reduction in taxes, not just a freeze. (Weird slap at Trump there! This site earns its banner declaration: "Independent. Unapologetic.")
The FITSnews editorialist doesn't trust Moe Brown's progressive promise: "...his announcement release fails to mention how much those [5,000] jobs cost taxpayers in the form of crony capitalist incentives. Because there was (and is) a cost to taxpayers every time government makes such 'economic development' announcements … of course the current occupant of this office [Ralph Norman] knows all about crony capitalism, too." That does give me pause. I chalked up Moe Brown's success as an expression of his personality, hoping it's not also an expression of his values.
The district is more suburban/urban in the north (neighborhoods just south of Charlotte, NC and around Rock Hill), more rural in the south. Is there enough progressive voter strength in the north, and enough untapped voters in the south, to give Moe Brown a shot at this? Am I wildly optimistic to say yes?Things are changing in South Carolina. Jaime Harrison is a lion going after the gazelle, Lindsey Graham, right now, and there's already a Republican Black US Senator, Tim Scott. If Moe Brown is registering voters all throughout those rural counties, he might have a shot at a long forward pass.
Honestly, John Hickenlooper was not my choice to win the Colorado Democratic primary for US Senate, but the people of Colorado seem to want him. And Cory Gardner, the incumbent Republican, is widely considered the most vulnerable US Senator this year, except maybe for Doug Jones in Alabama.
J.W. Williamson was the founding editor in 1972 of the Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, which he edited until July of 2000. He has taught college classes in Appalachian history, cultural politics, and literature, and he has lectured widely on the pop-culture history of "Appalachia" in the American consciousness. His books include Interviewing Appalachia, Southern Mountaineers in Silent Films, and Hillbillyland: What the Mountains Did to the Movies and What the Movies Did to the Mountains. He has won the Thomas Wolfe Award given by the Western North Carolina Historical Society, the Laurel Leaves Award given by the Appalachian Consortium, a special Weatherford Award given by Berea College, and the Cratis Williams-James Brown Award given by the Appalachian Studies Association.
The views expressed on WataugaWatch are solely those of J.W. Williamson or individual contributors and are not necessarily shared nor endorsed by the Watauga County Democratic Party nor by any other adults of sound mind in this or any other universe.
